Japanese Early-Patent Publication No. 62 [this corresponds to the year 1987]-16736 discloses a flaskless molding machine for molding stacked flaskless molds by using two pairs of a cope flask and a drag flask in which one cope flask and one drag flask form one pair. In this machine, mounted on the upper side of a machinery mount is a squeeze station that horizontally squeezes molding sand horizontally as viewed from the floor level. Further, mounted on the lower side or near the floor level is a stripping station for matching the molds and removing them vertically from the flasks as viewed from the floor level. Two pairs of the cope flask and the drag flask are alternately and intermittently and reciprocatingly moved between the squeeze station and the stripping station. With this arrangement, because an interchangeable match plate to be sandwiched between the cope and drag flasks can be exchanged near the floor level, the necessary labor is reduced.
The foregoing conventional machine, however, may encounter a problem. It is that insufficient molding sand might be charged into the flasks, and thus the resulting molds might lack the desired hardness. Accordingly, there is a need for a flaskless molding method that can steadily and readily produce molds having the desired hardness.